Eleven
by hongkongstar
Summary: heart on your sleeve and your soul in your shoes, take a left a sharp left and another left, meet me on the corner and we'll start again. Post modern pretentious lack of chronological order. AU, PYT verse. AxelRoxas.
1. Dress

**Dress**

Axel and Roxas have the kind of arguments where chairs and toasters get thrown out of windows and the neighbours call the police. Roxas has got it down to a fine art though; shimmying out the window and down the fire escape just as the knock on the door comes and he can slip out from under Axel's gaze. If there's only one person there, it doesn't count as the type of domestic disturbance that it really is. It's just Axel having a hissy fit. The police always look suspicious, like Axel's knocked whoever over the head with a skillet and was halfway through stuffing them in the freezer when they knocked, but all the magazines and blogs get a hold of is that Axel's got a temper, and Axel's having a constant breakdown, and Axel never likes his furniture.

The next day Roxas has almost the exact same argument with his parents and ends up back at Axel's, picking around the three dining chairs and two electrical appliances sprawled out in the tiny green square of grass framed on all sides by high-rise high-cost apartment blocks. He sits on the fire escape outside Axel's window for two hours, leans back and watches birds pinwheel through the cut of clear blue sky he can see, before Axel finally gets his arse out of bed and opens the window.

"Goddamn," he says, and whistles through his teeth. "It's this kinda shit that makes me happy I'm around for your teenage rebellion phase." He reaches forward to tug at the strap of the dress Roxas is wearing, but Roxas flicks his hand away.

"I'm not a fucking teenager, Axel," he says, and takes the last drag off his cigarette before crushing it into the metal beside him and climbing in over the sill smoothly.

He pins Axel face first into the wall by the open window, hitches the little black dress up around his hips and fucks him there, with no messy sort of preamble like words or apologies or explanations. Axel and Roxas have the kind of violent make-up sex that means they're pretty much always breaking up, teetering on the edge of what is and what isn't what they do. Axel ends up on his back on the floor, stretching out loose muscles like a cat in the honey slats of warm sunshine streaming in on him. Roxas finds his camera where he left it, on the coffee table, and takes about twenty shots of Axel fucked out and smeared with come, eyes hazy and acid-cut green, bare skin, curled fingers.

"The dress is for Halloween," Roxas says. He takes his time scrolling through the shots, examining the play of light and shadow, the taut edge of colour. The dress was the only thing in his wardrobe this morning when his father started bitching him out over his cereal, so the dress was the thing he grabbed before climbing out his bedroom window and climbing down the trellis outside.

Roxas, since he met Axel, spends a lot of his time climbing in and out of windows.

Axel grins, raises one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sunlight. Roxas takes another five shots, the shutter whirling. "Man, you need to start doing your own laundry," Axel says. Roxas hums to himself, adjusts the zoom.

Two weeks later, the morning after Halloween, Axel goes out for coffee and comes back with the tabloids. There's three pictures, one from the back, cut off just under his arse and Axel's arm around his shoulders hiding the square set of his body, and two half shoddy facial shots, a partially blurred mess of turning facial features and the gaudy neon makeup Naminé helped him slop on. It's enough for the 'journalists' to declare him a P.Y.T and wonder more about where Axel managed to pick _her_ up than why _she_ doesn't appear to be wearing a Halloween costume when everyone else is.

"See, they agree with me," Axel says. "Pretty pretty." He mouths and nips at Roxas' cheekbone until Roxas pushes him away, careful to rescue his coffee from Axel's hand before it gets out of reach.

He chews at the split in his lip where Axel bit the thick turquoise lipstick off his mouth the night before, folding and creasing the magazine page until he can just see the photos, not the text. After that it takes him less than a minute to decide that he takes much better photos of Axel, anyway, and he discards the magazine somewhere across Axel's bedroom floor like the garbage it is.


	2. Tattoo

**Tattoo**

Axel is everything Roxas' parents hate. Gaudy new trash celebrity, working like an artist and living off the money the masses give him for it. His hair is two shades off neon, his grin one cut away from deadly. He lives in one of those pretentious loft styled apartments on the teetering edge between the wrong side of town and the _right_ side of town, filled with mismatched furniture and shelves and shelves of records and CDs. He wears sunglasses when it's raining. Takes his shirt off with little to no encouragement. Lets Roxas in his window and covers him in fingerprints, smears him with DNA.

It's just as well Roxas' parents don't know about him.

He has four tattoos, dark and sharp-stark on his skin, but he won't talk about them when Roxas asks. Roxas thinks they've really got to mean something though, the cutting tears inked onto his face, the 8 across his heart, the VIII on the inside of his right wrist. He takes his time, sometimes, sucking at the flesh there and grinding slow and heated into Axel's hip, until Axel snaps taut and flips him, pins him to the mess of sheets and fucks him fast and harsh and _good_.

After times like that, when Roxas is back on the right side of town, leaning out of his bedroom window for a smoke, he trails his hand down his body, finding the bruises Axel left, digging his fingers into the ache of healing tissue and flesh. He jerks off like that, arched out on his bed with his hands pressing into black-blue skin, curved fingerprints at his hips and thighs, stomach, ribs. They always fade, eventually, from black to purple to green to yellow.

He wants to carve Axel into his skin; split himself open and let Axel into the shell left behind. It's never enough. The bruises always fade.

And so, stumbling down dark streets after one of Axel's gigs, he gets blindsided by flashing neon lights and ends up tugging Axel into an all night tattoo parlour.

"Oh man what," says Axel. "This is sleazy." But he just stands there, looking confused while Roxas signs on the dotted line and climbs up into the chair. His ears are framed with as many rings as Axel's; he figures he can take this. The needle pushes threads of whipcord thin pain through his skin, but all he can really feel is Axel's eyes on him, watching as line after line of ink is sliced into his flesh.

Afterwards Axel drags him back to his apartment and presses him down, face first into the bed. He peels the dressing off from between Roxas' shoulder blades, but never touches the inflamed skin. He fucks Roxas open with four fingers until he comes wet between his stomach and the sheets, then jerks off across his thighs. He runs his fingers along the very edge of swollen, red skin, pressing gradually harder until Roxas hisses out a swear word.

"You gonna tell me what it means," Axel says, mouth hot on Roxas' neck. Roxas grins, bites at the come-slick fingers that push into his mouth until they bleed.

"No," he says, and shoves Axel off of him and onto the floor.


	3. Laundry

**Laundry**

Roxas gets caught, sometimes, in the space between night and morning, hanging suspended and lost. He spends hours in his room, laying out prints and unrolling spools of film. The red glow of the darkroom makes his skin deadly, his eyes bloody. He spreads a world out in photograph, chemicals shining slick, prints pinned onto lines around him, moments in time long passed. He picks back and forth from room to room, stepping sideways over spread portfolios and incomplete sets, fetching food and forgetting it as the light from the fridge catches his hand in shadow and composition tears his mind away, again.

He ends up like this for days, developing reel upon reel of film, a side hobby, experiment in realism and existence over the transient feel of the digital camera favoured by his hands. The spools of outdated film line up along his windowsill for months before he wakes in the night, craving the solace of the darkroom. Here he has choice shots, things chosen and planned, composition and lighting carefully laid out and angled, rather than the immediacy of the digital. So it's a complete surprise to him when he comes to the tenth or twentieth reel and finds, framed in a moment of hot colour and light: Axel.

The whole roll is Axel; a day forgotten. Uncomposed shots, half of them useless and blurred as Axel _moves_. He draws each image out of the print carefully, holding his breath as if he'll drown somewhere in the chemical swim.

He hangs the day out along a line; Axel, already used to the constant presence of the camera, just goes about his business, largely ignoring it, seemingly ignoring Roxas. But, every now and then, his face is turned towards the camera, as if called or calling. His eyes are the sort of colour that sets the whole photograph ablaze, the edges become dull and the eye is drawn down, down into that gaze, the man behind it.

Roxas' hands shake; how long has he been doing this? Lost in time, surrounded on all sides by captured moments, hanging, trapped in the red-black glow of his own misplaced life.

He shakes himself free, chewing at his lip as he washes his hands clean, slams himself out of room after room and into the warm night air. He doesn't think, just lets his feet carry him.

He's about a block away from Axel's when his eye catches, and he turns to see Axel sat in an all night laundrette, alone. Sat on one of the long benches in the middle, framed on all sides by the metallic sheen of the machines, his leg propped up on the bench, his glasses halfway down his nose. The book he's reading is dog-eared and likely something Roxas has never heard of before.

Roxas' fingers itch for his camera, but he left it behind. He's glad; he's spent too much of this time watching from behind the viewfinder.

A cheap electronic bell rings out from somewhere inside when he pushes open the door. Axel glances over and pauses, surprise painted fleetingly across his face before it turns into some sort of confused scowl. "Rox," he says. He puts the book down.

Roxas ignores the hard line of his spine and straddles the bench next to him, leaning his forehead against his shoulder. His fingers loop and catch at the bottom of his shirt, thumbs brushing against the skin underneath. He doesn't know how long it's been: two weeks? A month? He left his cell phone somewhere in the mess of his bed sheets, his watch and clocks forgotten. "I got caught up," he says; mumbles, really.

The washing machine Axel's sat in front of stops whirling and makes a dull sort of chime. Axel doesn't move, but his body leans towards Roxas, and Roxas lets out the breath he'd been holding tight like a curl of acid in his stomach. His thumbs press more firmly against the skin of Axel's side, and he lets the familiar heat soak into him.


	4. Squid

**Squid**

It's not all that surprising that Axel is really pretty shit at looking after himself. He forgets to pay the bills and his rent, takes the rubbish out two days late, never gets around to rearranging missed parcels. Cleaning, washing and laundry, he's fine with, and he's actually what Roxas would grudgingly call an amazing cook, but that means shit when he hasn't got any food in his apartment.

"Your fridge is empty," Roxas says, shirtless and fresh from the shower, standing with the fridge door open. Axel stops clattering around in a cupboard behind him and leans over; chin digging into the muscle of Roxas' shoulder.

"Not true," he says. "Got beer." He reaches in and snags one of the bottles by the neck and wanders off, back to whatever.

Roxas' stomach makes some sort of aborted sound of distress, and he takes one last disdainful look at the fridge before firmly shutting the door. "I'm going home," he says.

He's turning and heading back to the bedroom to get his shirt when Axel catches his arm, two fingers curved over his wrist and the beer bottle pressed against the back of his hand. "Hey now, don't be so hasty," he says. He pushes his nose into the curling damp hair behind Roxas' ear, mouth opening hot against the skin there. "Get dressed. I'll take you somewhere."

It's five minutes later that Roxas finds himself out on the evening slicked streets, walking side by side with Axel, Axel-in-disguise. He finds it strange to be walking with him like this, dark sunglasses and neon hair hidden beneath a black beanie, as if a stranger has wandered out of the shadows somewhere and joined him for a stroll. So he doesn't say anything, and Axel doesn't say anything, but it doesn't hang uncomfortably, and it doesn't feel like anything cracks between them when Axel's hand brushes against his arm.

"Hey, this way," he says, and takes a left.

They end up down in the cluttered backstreets of Hoxlow market, most of the stores and stalls that don't sell something sex related closed for the night, but still the place is packed and thrumming with people. Axel takes him around so many darkened corners and winding alleys he doesn't think he'll be able to find his way out alone, but then they stop, and there's a street filled with clatter and steam, food and paper plates and cigarette smoke.

Axel sits him down at a free table and comes back ten minutes later with a large plate heaped high with calamari, and Roxas wrinkles his nose despite himself. "What," says Axel, "you don't like it?" He spears a lemon quarter with a cheap plastic fork and squeezes the juice out over the lot, until the lemon's nothing more than stringy pulp and abused rind. He discards it.

"Never tried it," Roxas says, and Axel's taken off the sunglasses and pushed the beanie up slightly, strands of hair sticking out discordantly across his forehead.

He grins, picking up one of the smaller rings and holding it out, hovering in front of Roxas' closed mouth. "Come on," Axel says. "You'll love it."

Axel feeds him five of the rings before allowing him to feed himself, but even then seems reluctant to give up the task. "See," he says, drawing his fingers out from between Roxas' lips and leaving the fifth ring behind. "Not so bad, right?"

His thumb brushes a smear of lemon juice away from the corner of Roxas' mouth, and Roxas just rolls his eyes, starts chewing.


	5. Crocus

**Crocus**

The first time Axel hits Roxas, it's a sound, hard punch across the face. It makes the air crack with the snap of bone on bone, the force behind it causing the padding of skin and flesh to mean nothing. And really, Roxas had deserved it, had spent the day pushing Axel's buttons, deliberately tipping him further and further, revelling in how his face went tight, the white of his bared teeth.

The first time Roxas hits Axel is immediately after, an automatic retaliation, and his fist met flesh before he even realised that he'd begun the motion. It's in the bathroom, after, with the door closed and only his reflection for judge that he thinks, _I want to take that back_.

The skin around his eye is already beginning to bruise, the colour of blue spring crocuses trampled underfoot, but he's more interested in the split skin across his knuckles. He runs his hand under the water but the blood still wells, Russian red, stinging. It makes his skin feel tight, itching, nerves buzzing static. He wants to shred his skin, shuck it off like a snake, leave only muscle and bone and self.

He sheds his clothes, leaving them in a pile on the floor, and steps into the shower, turning the water up as hot as he can stand.

It's only a few long minutes before Axel comes in, stepping naked into the shower behind him, one scrawny arm wrapping around his middle as he presses himself up against Roxas' back. There's nothing sexual in it, this motion. His chest slides wet against Roxas' shoulders, stomach against his back, thighs and limp cock against his arse. Roxas stares down through waterlogged lashes at the hand pressed against his ribs, the damaged skin over the second and third knuckles, and leans back into the support Axel gives him, the water pounding white noise into their bodies.


End file.
